UVM women's hockey ready for second-ranked Eagles

Feb. 21, 2013

Written by

Free Press Correspondent

For the University of Vermont women’s hockey team, the home series with Boston College Eagles to wrap up the regular season this weekend at The Gut means nothing and everything.

The Saturday(noon)/Sunday (2 p.m.) series will have no effect on UVM’s playoff position. Win two, lose two, whatever, the Catamounts will be in sixth place at the end of play. That’s the nothing part of it.

As for the everything aspect, a strong showing against the second-ranked Eagles would boost confidence for UVM’s first Hockey East playoff appearance and demonstrate how far the Catamounts have come this season under first-year coach Jim Plumer.

“We’ve made huge progress,” said Plumer, whose Catamounts are 8-19-3 overall and 6-10-3 in HEA after records of 4-22-6 and 3-16-2 in Tim Bothwell’s last year. “We may not have won as many games as I would have liked, but we’re playing better right now than maybe I could have imagined us being able to play.

“We’re playing the No. 2 team in the country and we just played the No. 3 team in the country last weekend at BU,” Plumer said. “We’re looking at this to test ourselves and see how we are a month after having played (the Eagles) before.”

“As the season has gone on, that’s been the best measuring stick for us … let’s see how much better we’ve gotten since the last time we’ve played that team,” he said. “We’re excited for that.”

Against the Terriers, who dropped to fourth in the national rankings after sweeping UVM 2-1 and 3-2, Plumer said, “Honestly, we probably played as well as we can humanly play. We played really strong. We were aggressive and we kept them off-balance. It was a 1-1 game and it took an Olympian to score a world-class goal with a minute and a half to win the first game.

“The second game I don’t think we were quite as sharp but we played with as much energy as we had (in the first game),” he said. “We battled back, down 3-0 halfway through the game, made it 3-2 and certainly made the last few minutes interesting.”

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Those BU games plus this weekend’s games against BC should prepare the Catamounts for the one-game quarterfinal, Plumer said.

“We’re going against a really talented, fast, well-coached team. We’re going to have to be mentally and physically sharp,” he said.

“The best thing right now is whatever the record is, the kids are really positive because they see the progress that we’ve made and they feel good about the fact that they can play well and have success,” Plumer said.

Sunday’s game will be Senior Day for UVM and Plumer said of his three seniors, “Kelci Lanthier has had two fantastic games recently and Erin Wente and Emily Walsh have been phenomenal. I’m happy for them and what they’ve accomplished and sad to see them go. They’re good people and great leaders for us.”

Though at least three games remain this year, Plumer said of the future, “I think it will be a super-valuable offseason for me in my first year, being able to assess everything from the way our staff delegates our responsibilities to understanding the players better enough to know their strengths and weaknesses and be able to design systems and styles of play to take advantage of that.

“Whether or not we win none or one or more playoff games this year, I think we’ll be able to carry that into the future,” he said. “We’ve established the foundation of how we want to play and we think that will carry over to a bigger roster, more depth and more quality, too. There’s no guarantee, but every sign points to that.”